⚔️ Warbell

Defend the keep against nightly ork sieges.

A knight holds a central castle through wave after wave of night assaults across a five-biome island — real-time combat, an economy and upgrade tree, a town you build and defend, inventory and consumables, villagers, wildlife, and a bloodline succession loop. Built in Rust on Bevy 0.18.

▶ Website · ⬇ Download for Windows · Changelog

Play

• Windows: download Warbell-Setup.msi and run it. The installer is self-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows "Unknown Publisher" — click More info → Run anyway.
• itch.io: miskibin.itch.io/warbell — Windows & Linux builds, pushed automatically on every release (works with the itch.io app for auto-updates).
• From source (any platform): see Build from source below.

Controls

• WASD / arrows move · Space jump · Shift sprint · LMB attack · RMB block
• V / the HUD FP button — toggle first-person view
• E contextual interact — walk up to the keep (upgrades), a merchant stall (shop), the war bell (ring in the night), or a chest (open it) and a prompt names it
• B build mode — at your town, press B, then point and click to raise houses, farms, woodcutters and mines
• Tab / I satchel · Q eat food · Y / T quick-slots · Z / X / C combat arts
• F forage / rescue · R recruit · ` (backquote) free-roam fly-cam · P / Esc pause
• F1 debug tuning panel · F2 perf/state overlay · 1–5 swap biome patch

Build from source

cargo run        # build + open the game window
cargo test       # run the crates/core parity tests (the validation spec)
cargo check      # type-check without the (slow) link

On a fresh Linux box you need Bevy's system libraries once before the first build:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y \
  libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libudev-dev libasound2-dev

(macOS / Windows need none of this.) The first build is slow — bevy compiles at opt-level = 3 even in dev so the scene isn't single-digit FPS — but incremental rebuilds of src/ are fast.

Architecture

Two crates:

• crates/core (tileworld_core) — pure, deterministic, zero-dependency game logic (f64 throughout). Pathfinding (A*), the wave director, upgrade / buff / resource / inventory stores, ork & animal config, factions, RNG, the shop catalog. This is the unit-tested validation spec — cargo test runs it. No Bevy, no I/O, no rendering.
• tileworld_bevy_forest (root src/) — the Bevy app: rendering, ECS systems, input, the scene. It imports tileworld_core for all the numbers/logic that must stay correct, wrapping core's stores as Resources (PlayerRes, Bank, Inventory, …).

Each src/<feature>.rs is a self-contained Plugin; main.rs is the assembly list — read it as the table of contents. The whole world-sim is gated behind a freeze-gate state machine (game_state.rs): opening any panel or leaving Playing freezes the sim but keeps rendering.

See CLAUDE.md for the full conventions (coordinate frame, despawn-race rules, mesh-building contract, combat-number parity) and docs/superpowers/specs/ for the per-subsystem roadmap and design docs.

Screenshot harness

The Bevy window can't be captured externally, so visuals are verified via a render-and-exit harness:

# PowerShell
$env:FOREST_SHOT="shot.png"; cargo run
# bash
FOREST_SHOT=shot.png cargo run

It renders ~90 frames so lighting/IBL settle, saves the PNG, and exits. Stage the shot with env vars read at startup: FOREST_CAM / FOREST_TIME (camera pose / time-of-day), FOREST_BIOME (boot into a biome), FOREST_WAVE / FOREST_DEFEND=1 (stage a night siege), FOREST_MENU=1 (start screen), FOREST_PANEL=tree|inv|build (open a UI panel), FOREST_FP=1 (first-person), FOREST_EQUIP="sword_gold,gold_armor" (equip items on the hero). BEVY_ASSET_ROOT points at this dir if you run the binary from elsewhere.

License

Warbell's source code is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — read, build, run, modify, and share it for non-commercial purposes; commercial use is reserved. The assets under assets/ carry their own terms (e.g. game-icons.net icons under CC BY 3.0, the Cinzel / EB Garamond fonts under the SIL Open Font License; audio and other art may be separately licensed). See LICENSE for the full text and the asset note.